Guest Column
The Second Founding of Bolivia
By Eduardo Galeano- February 19, 2006
Deputy
Morales was ejected from the Parliament. On the 22nd of January of the year
2006, in the same hall of pomposity, Evo Morales was consecrated President
of Bolivia. In other words: Bolivia begins to discover that it is a country
of an indigenous majority.
At the time of the expulsion, an Indian deputy was rarer than a green dog.
Four years later, many are the legislators who chew coca, a millennial
custom which was prohibited in the sacred parliamentary space. Long before
the expulsion of Evo, his people, the indigenous, had already been expelled
from the official nation. They were not children of Bolivia: they were
merely its hands. Until a little more than half a century ago, the Indians
could not vote or walk on the sidewalks of its cities.
With good reason, Evo said, in his first presidential address, that the
Indians were not invited, in 1825, to the founding of Bolivia. That is also
the history of all America, including the United States. Our nations were
born all false. The independence of the American countries was from the
beginning usurped by a very minor minority. All the first constitutions,
without exception, left out women, the indigenous, Blacks, and the poor in
general.
The election of Evo Morales is, at least in this sense, equivalent to the
election of Michelle Bachelet. Evo and Eva. For the first time an indigenous
president in Bolivia, for the first time a woman president in Chile. And the
same could be said of Brazil, where for the first time the Minister of
Culture is Black. Doesn't the culture that has saved Brazil from sadness
have African roots?
In these lands, sick with racism and machismo, there will be some who
believe that all this is a scandal. What is scandalous is that it had not
happened earlier. The mask falls, the face appears, and the tempest roars.
The only language worthy of faith is the language born of the necessity to
speak. The gravest flaw of Evo is that people believe him, because he
conveys authenticity even when, speaking Castellano [Spanish], which is not
his mother tongue, he makes some minor error. The doctors who are masters of
echoing others' voices accuse him of ignorance. The peddlers of promises
accuse him of demagogy. Those who imposed a single God, a single king, and a
single truth in America accuse him of caudillismo. And the assassins of
Indians tremble in panic, fearful that their victims will be like them.
Bolivia seemed to be no more than the pseudonym of those who ruled Bolivia
and squeezed it out even as they sang its national anthem. And the
humiliation of the Indians, made customary, seemed a destiny. But in the
most recent times, months, years, this country lived in a perpetual state of
popular insurrection. This process of continuous uprisings, which left a
trail of dead, culminated in the gas war, but the process had begun long
ago. It had existed long before the recent uprisings and it continued after
them, until the election of Evo against all odds.
An old history of treasures plundered for more than four centuries, since
the middle of the sixteenth century, was being repeated in the case of
Bolivian gas:
the silver of Potosí left a barren mountain,
the saltpeter of the Pacific coast left a map without a sea,
the tin of Oruro left a multitude of widows.
That, and only that, they left.
The people who rose up in the last several years got riddled with bullets,
but they prevented the gas from evaporating into the hands of others,
unprivatized the water in Cochabamba and La Paz, overthrew governments
governed from abroad, and said no to the income tax and other wise orders
from the International Monetary Fund.
From the point of view of the civilized media of communication, these
explosions of popular dignity were acts of barbarism. A thousand times I
have seen, read, heard it: Bolivia is an incomprehensible country,
ungovernable, intractable, unviable. The journalists who say it and repeat
it are mistaken: they should confess that Bolivia is, for them, an invisible
country.
That is not remarkable. That blindness is not only a bad custom of
arrogant foreigners. Bolivia was born blind to itself, because racism spins
a web that covers the eyes, and there is certainly no lack of Bolivians who
prefer to see themselves through the eyes that despise them.
But there must be a reason why the indigenous flag of the Andes pays
homage to the diversity of the world. According to tradition, it's a flag
born of the mating of the female rainbow with the male rainbow. And this
earthly rainbow, which in the native tongue is called the flaming cloth of
blood, has more colors than the rainbow in the sky.
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